Lamentably common misunderstanding of meritocracy

Tyler Cowen pointed to an article by business-school professor Luigi Zingales about meritocracy. I’d expect a b-school prof to support the idea of meritocracy, and Zingales does not disappoint.

But he says a bunch of other things that to me represent a confused conflation of ideas. Here’s Zingales:

America became known as a land of opportunity—a place whose capitalist system benefited the hardworking and the virtuous [emphasis added]. In a word, it was a meritocracy.

That’s interesting—-and revealing. Here’s what I get when I look up “meritocracy” in the dictionary:

1 : a system in which the talented are chosen and moved ahead on the basis of their achievement
2 : leadership selected on the basis of intellectual criteria

Nothing here about “hardworking” or “virtuous.” In a meritocracy, you can be as hardworking as John Kruk or as virtuous as Kobe Bryant and you’ll still get ahead—-if you have the talent and achievement. Throwing in “hardworking” and “virtuous” seems to me to an attempt (unconscious, I expect) to retroactively assign moral standing to the winners in an economic race.

Chris, I don’t think that’s the sense of “virtuous” anyone currently means when they apply it to a person.

To quibble slightly with the original post, there’s a relationship between “achievement” and hard work. It’s not an identity, but seriously, the first benefits from the second. So a smidgen of “hard work” is perceptible, I think, in the “meritocracy” mix.

Um, in a sense the dictionary definition is wrong too. Michael Young coined the term as a satirical comment on an unfair system of merit, or a system where talent was wrongly identified and in the process the abilities of lower classes that didn’t fit into the meritocratic norm were ignored.

I was going to mention Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy, decided not to, but since Jonny R has … I think it’s probably still worth reading (first pub. 1958, reissued ’94 with a new intro) though I read it a very long time ago and my memory of it is somewhat hazy.

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